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Six months ago, I would have said Kaggle, Juptyer, Python, figure things out. I've since discovered Microsoft's ML Studio. It allows you to start out with drag

Six months ago, I would have said Kaggle, Juptyer, Python, figure things out. I've since discovered Microsoft's ML Studio. It allows you to start out with drag and drop (no code to learn) and, most importantly, you can visually see the output of your experiments. For example if you run a binary decision tree algorithm you can actually look at images of the 1000 trees it created and what the nodes from them is. Not important for practical functioning in the real world, but I like it a lot as a tool to learn.

shostack 10y ago
Does this actually teach you much though? Or will you more likely end up toggling a bunch of things, seeing an output, and not having any better understanding of what led to the output or why a given approach works better? Not that there isn't value in immediate results for building excitement and interest--I just want to have proper expectations before I check it out as I'm in a similar state to the parent in terms of where my math is and wanting to dive in.
- true_religion 10y ago
  When learning, I like to continually create a mental model for what will happen, and check if I'm correct. It's like doing problem sets in math, then plugging in the problem to MathLab to see the result. I've never used this Microsoft product, but if lets you take educated guesses at what will work, and gives you some insights into the intermediate steps, then its useful as a check that your mental model of machine learning is becoming more coherent and useful. Plus, if you slot in something and it gives a better output, you can go back to your studies with a new target of finding out why X param changed things.
  - shostack 10y ago
    The particular concern that sparked this with me is the concern of over-fitting to the data set. I don't know enough about ML to know how much of a risk that might be, but with a tool like this I wonder if that becomes obvious, or if you risk taking away false learnings just because you saw the output you hoped for, despite it being perhaps horribly overfit. Again, that's just one example, and the instant visual feedback is awesome (I'm a visual learner, so that's huge). But at the end of the day, I know that there is a lot of math and code under the pretty graphics, and at some point I'll need to tackle that to make sure I am actually learning this and not just making assumptions based on what I can eyeball with some visualizations.
    - Joof 10y ago
      Learn to multiply matrices (you can probably Google this). Note that AB != BA in matrix math. Learn derivatives and how to do them with a lookup table. Learn what log() means (the inverse of some number to a power). That's enough to implement and understand neural networks. You'll fumble around a lot more than you have to, but you can figure it out. Honestly, you could probably fight your way through Ng's class with just matrix multiplication, which you can learn in less than an hour fairly easily.
swiley 10y ago
Typing out text isn't hard (and honestly, if you're working with software it's preferable). GUIs give you two things to learn: the fancy editor, and the language.
- chc 10y ago
  Was the GP edited after you replied? Because the comment as it exists now is about how ML Studio makes it easy to learn through visualizations. The difficulty of typing has nothing to do with it.

shostack 10y ago

Does this actually teach you much though? Or will you more likely end up toggling a bunch of things, seeing an output, and not having any better understanding of what led to the output or why a given approach works better? Not that there isn't value in immediate results for building excitement and interest--I just want to have proper expectations before I check it out as I'm in a similar state to the parent in terms of where my math is and wanting to dive in.

true_religion 10y ago
When learning, I like to continually create a mental model for what will happen, and check if I'm correct. It's like doing problem sets in math, then plugging in the problem to MathLab to see the result. I've never used this Microsoft product, but if lets you take educated guesses at what will work, and gives you some insights into the intermediate steps, then its useful as a check that your mental model of machine learning is becoming more coherent and useful. Plus, if you slot in something and it gives a better output, you can go back to your studies with a new target of finding out why X param changed things.
- shostack 10y ago
  The particular concern that sparked this with me is the concern of over-fitting to the data set. I don't know enough about ML to know how much of a risk that might be, but with a tool like this I wonder if that becomes obvious, or if you risk taking away false learnings just because you saw the output you hoped for, despite it being perhaps horribly overfit. Again, that's just one example, and the instant visual feedback is awesome (I'm a visual learner, so that's huge). But at the end of the day, I know that there is a lot of math and code under the pretty graphics, and at some point I'll need to tackle that to make sure I am actually learning this and not just making assumptions based on what I can eyeball with some visualizations.
  - Joof 10y ago
    Learn to multiply matrices (you can probably Google this). Note that AB != BA in matrix math. Learn derivatives and how to do them with a lookup table. Learn what log() means (the inverse of some number to a power). That's enough to implement and understand neural networks. You'll fumble around a lot more than you have to, but you can figure it out. Honestly, you could probably fight your way through Ng's class with just matrix multiplication, which you can learn in less than an hour fairly easily.

swiley 10y ago

Typing out text isn't hard (and honestly, if you're working with software it's preferable). GUIs give you two things to learn: the fancy editor, and the language.

chc 10y ago
Was the GP edited after you replied? Because the comment as it exists now is about how ML Studio makes it easy to learn through visualizations. The difficulty of typing has nothing to do with it.